Blog Heap of Links for the day 30 April 2009

"That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One. It actually was him - and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years - who shaped a budget so out of balance.

A New York police officer called to help a drunken woman get home safely instead raped her as she lay face down in her bed, semiconscious and covered in vomit while his partner acted as a lookout, prosecutors alleged Tuesday.

A former prison officer has given birth to a baby fathered by a 'dangerous' inmate. ... Police were called in over accusations that she had breached security, but she resigned before they finished investigating.

KATY — Police say a 12-year-old suburban Houston girl fatally shot her father in the back of the head, possibly while he was sleeping. ... Neighbor... told the newspaper there had been tension between the girl and her father.

'I will give £5 to anyone in Britain who wants to live under Sharia law,' he declares. 'It will help pay for their ticket to Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, or wherever it is customary to live under Sharia law. 'Please, please go and leave us alone. This is Britain, not 10th century Arabia!'

A man who Los Angeles police believe raped and murdered dozens of women decades ago was arrested by cold case investigators this month after a computer matched his DNA to evidence from two killings in the 1970s.

The wedding is off, the attorney confirmed, and not likely to ever happen.

A North Carolina congresswoman says she made a poor choice of words when she called the infamous murder of a gay Wyoming student a "hoax" to justify passing hate crimes bills. ... Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx said the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard wasn't a hate crime....

Thirteen people were killed at a university in Azerbaijan Thursday when a gunman went from floor to floor firing on teachers and students after the bell rang for morning classes. The gunman, a Georgian citizen of Azeri origin described as a loner by local media, was among the dead.

"So, from my perspective, what it relates to is mitigation. If you're out in the middle of a field when someone sneezes, that's one thing. If you're in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom, it's a different thing." That contradicted more restrained advice from President Barack Obama and the federal government — and the last thing the White House wants to do right now is shut down the airline industry and big-city subways out of mass panic.

Vice president Joe Biden said Thursday he would tell his family members not to use subways in the U.S. and implied schools should be shuttered as the swine flu outbreak spread to 16 states. His remarks quickly caused a stir, drawing a rebuke from New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and later leading the White House to apologize.

It was a really nice day. Then you hear a bang. Everyone looks up and you see people flying through the air

announced to a skeptical crowd of reporters and Zodiac aficionados here not only that the killer was her adoptive and long-dead father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, but that she had been present at at least one killing and had even scribbled some of the taunting notes the Zodiac sent to the press and the police. "I was a child and just thought I was helping my dad,"

After a cliffhanger of a plane landing in the Talkeetna Mountains earlier this month, 21-year-old Matthew "Jake" Soplanda of Anchor Point and a skiing buddy managed to climb away from Soplanda's dated, single-engine Taylorcraft as it hung perched over a 1,500-foot drop.

For over 30 years, a controversy has swirled over what may be the earliest known photographic image of Abraham Lincoln.... a healthy young man in the prime of life.... lacks what collectors call "provenance," a documented evidentiary history that establishes without break the exact chain of ownership of an antique or historical object of interest. Not long after Kaplan purchased the unidentified daguerreotype, the New York art gallery director died and the gallery's records that should have indicated the image's seller were lost....

It's been interesting to watch the media ramp-up to hysteria over the new influenza strain and now drop it like spoiled news because it's not deadly enough for the headlines. Too bad that's wrong twice.

When a container holding swine flu exploded on a Swiss train on Monday, it could have led to a nightmare scenario. Luckily the virus was not the mutated swine flu that has killed around 150 people in Mexico and that has already spread to parts of Europe.

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

"The claim of the conspiracy theorists is that this new combination could not have occurred naturally, but this is not true," the New Scientist's biology editor Michael Le Page wrote. "Flu viruses consisting of a mixture of human, swine and bird strains have been found before." Sound science, however, is no match for the Internet and unsubstantiated media reports when it comes to providing a forum for ideas that have forced responses from governments and companies alike.

The WHO says the phase 5 alert means there is sustained human-to-human spread in at least two countries. It also signals that efforts to produce a vaccine will be ramped up.

suggest a magnitude-7 earthquake occurs every 2,000 to 3,000 years in the basin, and that the largest fault in the basin, West Tahoe, appears to have last ruptured between 4,100 and 4,500 years ago.

What do you do when you have a fossil quarry that has yielded some of the most important and rarest of dinosaur fossils in North America, but the fossil-bearing layer of rock is tilted at 70 degrees and there is so much rock that not even jackhammers can get you to the fossils any longer? ... Over several days these skilled employees, using their expertise with explosives, blew away the rock covering the fossils and exposed a significant amount of the fossil-bearing layer so that excavation can begin again this year. Without their talents, scientifically important fossils would have remained locked underground in their stony mausoleum.....

Hitchens joined Anderson Cooper last night on a shortened version of "AC360" to discuss the life of Jerry Falwell. Former Director of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed was first up and as expected, praised Falwell...then came old Chris and he offered up an alternate perspective.

[Image]

an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors... The presence of such a layer in similar settings elsewhere could point to other regions of slow quakes. Slow earthquakes, also called silent earthquakes, take days, weeks, or even months to release pent-up energy instead of seconds or minutes as in normal earthquakes....

[World tectonic plates illustrated]

After studying a cockatoo that grooves to the Backstreet Boys and about 1,000 YouTube videos, scientists say they've documented for the first time that some animals "dance" to a musical beat.

"While we as humans might find it appealing to free a long-term captive animal," the researchers say in the paper, "the survival and well-being of the animal may be severely impacted in doing so."

According to court papers police found more than 1,000 bags of heroin and cash in both the women's homes on Ehler Street near Stroudsburg. Both are charged with possession with intent to deliver. Police believe the sisters had been dealing heroin out of their homes for almost six months and pulling in about $10,000 a week in sales.

A 1/10th-scale model of a NASA Saturn V rocket launched successfully on Saturday, becoming what is thought to be the largest amateur rocket ever to take off and be safely recovered. The feat could herald the arrival of the first amateur rockets to reach orbit.

Researchers said Thursday a skeleton found last year in Utah's redrock country is that of a 20-year-old artist, poet and wanderer who disappeared in the 1930s and has been the stuff of Western lore and Navajo legend ever since. The bones of Everett Ruess, a self-described vagabond from California, were discovered by a grandson of a Navajo elder who, according to a family story, had witnessed the young man's murder by other Indians and was haunted by it.

One of the more intersting new disclosures around Windows 7 has been the addition of Windows XP Compatibility Mode, which creates a virtualized Windows XP Professional environment to run what is essentially legacy code. However, enabling this mode also requires a separate download. Also of interest is the "Play To" feature, with improved media streaming around the network. Microsoft has also disabled the AutoRun feature from Windows 7, a response to worms like Conficker, which apply deceiving Autorun messages in an attempt to provoke users to click ad launch the malware.

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved... nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa... The so-called "Cape-colored" population of South Africa has highest levels of mixed ancestry on the globe, a blend of African, European, East Asian and South Indian... about 71 percent of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to western African origins. They also have between 13 percent and 15 percent European ancestry and a smaller amount of other African origins. There was "very little" evidence for American Indian genes among African-Americans....

grade school principal suspended over accusations she hawked her racy self-published potboiler during faculty meetings

'Whatever will they bring out next? Drug-addict Barbie? Alcoholic Barbie?'

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC's iPlayer... Beginning in 2012... PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the Internet an "unreliable toy."

appears yet another administrative account on the micro-blogging site has been breached, giving world+dog an inside peek at the accounts of Barack Obama, Ashton Kutcher, and other celebrities.

described as "broken" by one industry expert and as "childlike" by another...

Appearing Wednesday before a Senate panel, Napolitano said that "passive surveillance" is "not an accurate picture of what is going on" at U.S. entry points.